A few months after Indian startups set records in hiring from premier engineering and management schools, some have begun to renege on their offers.

HYDERABAD: A few months after Indian startups set records in hiring from premier engineering and management schools, some have begun to renege on their offers or are marking down salaries.

Hiring by startups at college campuses during the November-January placement season had surged as emerging businesses competed to recruit the best talent, but the recent funding crunch is forcing them to focus on profitability and paring costs. Investors weary of startups burning their cash too fast without building solid businesses have increased pressure on them to clean up and improve their strategies, and hiring has become a big casualty of this. Taxi aggregator Ola and online marketplace Snapdeal, among India's most valuable Internet companies, were even absent from campus placements this academic year, a stark contrast from a few months back when leading startups lobbied with top engineering schools for top slots at campus placements rivalling global technology giants such as Google.

"Student interest in joining startups is high and the number of offers from these companies made up around 50% of the total offers this year — the highest in three years," said TV Devi Prasad, head of placements at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad. "However, some companies have gone back on their commitments."

Food delivery startup Swiggy dropped out of the placements round at the institute, he said.

At the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, budget stay aggregator Stayzilla delayed the joining date for the 39 students it had hired to July-August, from April-May, and lowered the annual compensation package to Rs 20 lakh, excluding stock options. The company did not disclose its original offer made to the students.

"We had selected people keeping in mind a growth target of 8-10x. But given the current market environment, we are capping the growth at 4x," said Yogendra Vasupal, cofounder of Matrix Partners-backed Stayzilla, which is in the market to raise a series-C round of funding. "Also, we are increasing efficiency on operations side and increasing automation."

In some other cases, the salary 'corrections' caught the students as well as institutes unawares when the revisions came to their notice in the final offer letters. "Issues of non-compliance with packages or positions start usually after the students join in," said V Babu, adviser, training and placement at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras.

"Some of the startups that registered with us this year for placements did not turn up. In the last 2-3 years, the All-IIT Placement Committee has been increasingly discussing the action to be taken when startups do not live up to their commitments on compensation and job descriptions."

The number of startups that recruited from the institute during the latest placements season more than doubled to 125 from 56 a year ago. But prominent startups including Grofers, TinyOwl, Ola and Snapdeal that had registered for placements hiring at the institute dropped out.

Grofers, however, visited other campuses for placements.

"We visited more than 80 engineering and management campuses this year across India to offer various profiles at Grofers in design, marketing, operations, sales and technology. We have hired people as and when the need arrived. The minimum salary offered was 6 lakhs per annum, while the highest was 20 lakhs," a spokesperson for Grofers said.

Mohit Gundecha, chief executive of Jombay, which designs psychometric analysis tests for companies for recruitment, said the investment slowdown has significantly impacted hiring at startups for engineering, contact centers and operations positions as compared with 6-9 months earlier. "Selective placements are happening in sales and operations from tier-2, 3 and 4 colleges," he said.

Paytm, the online payments and marketplace company backed by China's Alibaba Group, has been an exception among the big startups. "We have hired from campus placements in all tier 1institutes across India this year," said Amit Sinha, vice-president at Paytm, adding that the number of offers made by the company at campus placements had doubled over last year.